Road Towards Muse
by Terapsina
Summary: Part of 'Rest of Their Lives' Series. "My brother has always had the tendency to react to death loudly and very badly, but this once with this one girl he mourned her death silently." Janna


Disclaimer: Don't own. If I did Anna wouldn't have died, but she did so I don't.

AN: After watching this season of Vampire Diaries I found out I didn't like Jeremy anymore, and the way he hasn't mentioned Anna once makes me want to hurt him a bit. But I liked the Jeremy of season one and didn't want him to suffer too much, so this is what I came up with as a compromise.

AN2: This story was previously called "My Brother and His Muse", but I didn't like it that much and when I reworked this to fit my Elena/Elijah story I changed it.

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o0O0o **Rest of Their Lives Series** o0O0o

o0O0o **Road Towards Muse** o0O0o

"_My brother has always had the tendency to react to death loudly and very badly, but this once with this one girl he mourned her death silently. I don't think I would ever have noticed at all if I hadn't attended his first public art show." – Elena._

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At first he didn't want to mourn at all, Anna was dead and he would never be able to bring her back. Besides he had already mourned so many, first his grandparents, then his parents and later Vicki. He couldn't bring himself to cry about anyone else, even if that someone was her.

So after his initial failed response of drinking her blood he tried to do what had lessened the pain the last time. The one person that had stopped the hurt from swallowing him whole after he lost Vicki was Anna, but Anna wasn't here anymore it was her loss he needed to move on from so he started his infatuation with Bonnie. It wasn't hard, she was sweet and beautiful and not that difficult to like, but despite how much he tried there was something missing and even though being with Bonnie sometimes held the memories of Anna at bay it didn't lessen them the way they had waned concerning Vicki once before.

It took until he and Bonnie were already broken up for him to finally realize that it wasn't a new relationship that had helped him move on from Vicki's disappearance and later death, it was Anna. If it had been any other girl that started flirting with him at the time he would probably still be laying around drinking and longing for the first girl he loved. But it had been Anna, and you couldn't help but to fall for the creepy stalker chick. He had really tried not to.

So once he finally accepted that he actually really had loved the girl that offered him immortality and that he really had lost her he did what he had stopped doing after the death of his parents, he started sketching his feelings onto paper the same way his sister wrote them down. That was when he started painting Anna, he never stopped.

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Jeremy knew that he had always needed a purpose in life, it was the way he was built. After his parents died his purpose was to make Vicki love him the way he did her, after she disappeared it was to become a vampire and find her, when he found out she was really dead it was to get to know Anna. And when he lost her he tried finding that purpose in the supernatural life his sister was so entrenched within.

But all of that was temporary he didn't really want to spend the rest of his life muddling through the affairs of vampires, werewolves and witches. And when he started to sketch again he learned how much it helped him with his emotions, how it helped to draw Anna's face to make sure that he never forgot the smallest detail about her. He started sketching her eyes both normally and when she was hungry for blood, because in either case they were beautiful.

In the end he found his purpose in art, because once he started painting Anna he continued by drawing everyone else he cared about too. Soon his sketchbook was filled with the faces of his mom and dad, Vicki, his grandparents, Elena, Jenna, Bonnie. Then once that part of him was satisfied he continued with the people he hated and soon the faces of John, Damon, Katherine and Klaus were adorning the paper too.

But in all that time it was still Anna he painted most often, her face that he added colors to. And he drew her in every moment he remembered sharing with her, the good ones as well as the bad. Hidden among his things were the most intimate ones, like the one where he first shared the night with her and the heartbroken face she wore when she figured out that he had been using her to find Vicki. He had even drawn her as he imagined she might have looked after his uncle killed her. Although that one he had burned soon after.

He had found a reason to live, it might not make him as happy as he would have been if he still had Anna in his life, but it made him content. And he no longer had the desire to worm his way into his sister's drama of a life. The day after his eighteenth birthday and months after they ultimately killed Klaus Jeremy left the town that felt like home to him only in his memories now.

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The years of art school he attended on scholarship were the hardest he would remember, because while his home town might have brought pain and horror it didn't leave the physical exhaustion one gets from daily working hard on something you love. But once he was done, when he finally left as one of the potentially best coming artists he had never felt more satisfaction over having completed something.

Over those years he had started to change his drawings of Anna slightly. He still remembered the lost opportunity of living forever with her. He now regretted his decision. But he couldn't change past mistakes so he aged her instead, if he couldn't be sixteen with her then even if only in his art she would turn older in time with him. He liked to imagine what could have been if Anna were human, and so he portrayed the impossible with the talent he possessed and had cultivated with hard work.

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This was yet another Mother's Day without a mother to give something to, but this once he had the urge to make a gift to Anna in case there was afterlife as well, in case she was watching.

He had never painted her, never had the urge before, but he still remembered that face so similar to Anna's. So he took his paintbrush and began to depict two women with Asian features dressed in the style of Victorian England. It was a mother and a daughter standing freely out in sunlight, he showed just how much love the two had for each other in the smiles they possessed. He remembered how he hadn't really liked Pearl, but he knew she had loved Anna as much as he did, so in a way this was a gift for her too.

Once he finished the portrait a week after starting it and looked upon the two faces depicted he knew he wasn't going to sell this portrait to anyone. At least for now it would stay with him.

And while he gazed upon the face of the girl he had lost he could almost feel her presence nearby, smiling at him in gratitude.

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After he left Mystic Falls he hadn't lost touch with his sister entirely, he only left without saying goodbye to her personally so she couldn't try to convince him to stay. Elena still visited him, they still talked over the phone and so it wasn't a surprise when she attended the first public art show that contained only his work.

He knew Elena had turned, he had even seen her many times after the fact so it wasn't shocking to see her twenty seven year old face among the mass of strangers, but besides his own age of thirty four it still felt unreal to know that he was her younger brother. Shaking off his thoughts he smiled and went over to hug his sister.

The night was spent shaking the hands of potential buyers, art collectors and even a few reporters. He didn't therefore have a lot of time to be near Elena or her unexpected choice for eternal companion. He didn't understand what she saw in Elijah, but he didn't have to for him to see that he made her happy. So therefore he was unprepared for the sudden hug he was enveloped in and even more so the tears he could feel dampening his tux. But then she whispered and he could only smile sadly.

"You really loved her. I'm sorry!"

His yes were drawn towards the three paintings that had obviously provoked her actions and he couldn't contain the tear that escaped him when he looked upon Anna's face. They were the three best works around, depicting the three faces Anna had shown to the world. One was the pleasant, but geeky teenage girl lurking in the shadows with a smile that told everyone around that she had a secret they would never learn. Another had her dressed as a young lady with her face set in a subtle frown, her form excluded quiet confidence and she looked at a point somewhere past you with eyes far too old for her face. The third one was the most potent, you could see her holding someone's bleeding hand and looking at it with something between desire, fear and hunger, her dark hair were casting her face into shadow showing everyone only enough of her to see that something about it was different, but not what that something was.

He carried Anna with him for such a long time now that it didn't bother him that Elena now knew about it too. After all although they were no longer as close as when they were younger and although she wasn't human anymore she was still his sister and maybe he was ready to share his grief over _his_ vampire's death now.

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He did date, he wasn't that oblivious to the world around him. But the relationships almost never lasted longer than a year and the two times they had he broke up with the women because they both wanted him to stop painting Anna.

He couldn't give that up. Drawing her was the closest he could be to her without dying himself and although there were days when he still missed her terribly he had no urge to die just yet. So when the women started to ask from him more than he was willing to give he made sure they left.

But he wasn't quite as heartless as he remembered Damon being before the man fell in love with Bonnie Bennett. Jeremy always made sure that everyone he started a relationship with knew that he would never love them the way they deserved. The unfortunate fact was that most of them thought they could manage to change his mind and he would forget the ghost of his past and realize he had met the love of his life in them. Except the love of his life _was_ the ghost haunting him, and it took a while before they too understood that.

And he did care about them, a few he even came to love. But no one overshadowed Anna, no one even managed to make him feel as if she was part of his past and should stay there. So maybe it would be healthier to stop his obsessive portrayal of her in his art, but if he ever did that he would lose his interest in art in general and that was the only thing in his life that kept the coming day bearable.

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He was sixty-five when he decided he was tired of the public life being a well known artist afforded and he moved back to the town he had left in such hurry forty-seven years ago. Despite the changes in the rest of the world Mystic Falls looked almost like he remembered it. The name of the Grill had changed, but its purpose there was the same, the school hadn't changed locations or grown larger and with the exception of Lockwoods and Forbes the Founding Families were all still there.

When he was given the chance to join the Council he almost laughed in they're faces, but managed to politely decline the offer. He was sure they still saw the amusement their highly honored invitation had invoked because leaving they slammed his front door shut with quite a force. If only they knew that practically the entire circle of his old friends was currently immortal, a werewolf or dead at their hands... they would have either laughed with him or more likely banished him from the town.

He loved the peace of a small town, even if that town happened to be the central location of any passing supernatural. But more importantly he loved getting to know the grand-kids of his aunt Jenna and Alaric. There were three of them Sarah, Jarod and Edward. All of them were brilliant, but it was Sarah that intrigued him the most, it was the way she seemed to know a secret that both fascinated and terrified her, the way the seventeen year old girl refused to talk about her new boyfriend in anything but the briefest of details.

The fact that he was in mystic falls and because he knew all that it entailed he started an investigation, he was pleased to see that there were no new animal attacks in the town recently and that no people had went missing. He was less so the first time he met William Andrews, but he could see that he at least cared about Sarah and after some investigation via Elena he knew that he was less like Damon from his earliest memories and more like Stefan. So after he had a long talk with both William and Sarah he left them to themselves, only Sarah had acquired a new ring he had regained after his sister's turning.

And then he watched as yet another love story played out before his eyes. It hurt to see the happiness in the young couple, but the pain had a sweetness to it he hadn't felt since losing Anna. For such a long time he felt slightly bitter with those who were lucky enough to keep their other halves after finding them, but now that bitterness lessened to almost nothing. After all he would see Anna again, he had lived long enough and seen enough not to question it.

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The night he finally died Jeremy was ninety-seven years old, he had been sick for a long time but that evening he sat up, grabbed his pencil and his sketchbook and for the first time drew himself by the side of Anna. All through his life he had changed the face he remembered slowly making it look older, or sometimes the same way he knew it had stayed for hundreds of years, but she was always portrayed alone or with her mother, he could never bring himself to be added there. This night he drew a sixteen-year old girl smiling and holding the hand of a sixteen-year old boy, both of them radiated happiness he hadn't felt since the last time he had seen Anna in person.

Once his job was finished he lay down and finally allowed sleep to overtake him, he knew he wouldn't wake up, not here. As he closed his eyes he was already dreaming of the girl that had been his muse for almost eighty years, he would join her in just a moment.

o0O0o **The End** o0O0o

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